HTC One Pre-Orders Hit “Hundreds of Thousands” in US

Things may start to look-up for HTC, as the HTC One seems to be seeing relatively strong demand in US, and HTC says they’ve received “hundreds of thousands” of pre-orders, and that this is the largest amount of pre-orders they’ve received for one phone ever.

“We are seeing our strongest initial response for any smartphone we’ve ever designed with several hundred thousand people in the U.S. pre-registering to purchase the new HTC One,” Mackenzie wrote in the message, confirmed by HTC on Monday

HTC has put a lot of attention and investment into creating a whole new process of making these new full aluminum body phones like the HTC One, and they say it can take four hours to make just one unit. The spike in pre-orders is great for HTC, although even if the demand is huge, they won’t be able to produce too many of them in the next few months, due to the supply issues with the ultra-pixel camera for the HTC One. Because of this HTC will focus only on the big markets first, such as the US, although they will still miss the March launch target for US:

“When we originally announced the new HTC One, we communicated a March availability date but we unfortunately will not meet this date in the U.S.,” he said.“We apologize for this delay and are confident that you will find that the new HTC One will be worth the wait”

HTC still hopes to fulfill all the HTC One pre-orders by the end of April. For their sake, that needs to happen, because the Galaxy S4 will start being sold on May 1st on T-mobile. The Galaxy S4 will be HTC One’s main competitor for this period of the year, and Samsung is going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars promoting it.

HTC can’t afford to pay that much on advertising right now, so they’ll have to create some viral marketing campaigns to keep the HTC One fresh in people’s minds, even as they get overwhelmed by Galaxy S4 ads. Of course, this implies that HTC will stop having supply issues by then, and if the HTC One still remains popular by then, at least they won’t be limited by how many they can make.